The Dish

Not a report from Tony Blair’s trip to the Middle East. Just another day in north Wales.

A worrying development:

"Images cannot be dispelled," Jonathan Meese once said, with Hitler in mind. "If you want to be rid of certain images, you must give them the chance to fight themselves." But it doesn’t look like Meese wants to dispel Hitler; it seems more like an invocation. And the strange thing is that precisely at the time when the last eye-witnesses are dying and in a generation that seemed so free of this shadow, the temptation exists to tap into the energy of evil. In his major exhibition in Frankfurt, Meese stuck a picture of Hitler above his self-portrait and wrote "Vater" next to it on the wall … This is not about post-modernism, this is not about deconstruction, it is about using Hitler’s power. Dirty is good, is the old art reflex at play here; dirty is fun, the excusatory logic behind it.

It’s the only moral thing to do – especially for those who have worked for the British or US governments. Time is running out. Quiggen and Henley second. The Bush administration hasn’t exactly been on the ball:

Remember a while back when an outcry went up about how few Iraqi refugees the US was admitting?  Then the US pledged to take 25,000, a whopping one percent, of the 2.2 million estimated to need resettlement?

We were supposed to resettle 7,000 in FY ’07 (which ends in September), but the US recently announced we would only process 2,000 by then.  Only 133 have made it into the country so far, apparently thanks mostly to the careful work of the Department of Homeland Security.

An island of domestic good sense, as usual:

"He seems to be opposing the military’s DADT policy and anti-gay discrimination. In fact, he seems to favor the closet for everyone in the workplace, not just gays. Maybe he’s just weird.

Given his age (72, almost) and party (Republican, sort of), give him some credit for maybe opposing DADT and definitely opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment. But rather than psychoanalyzing him, we need to get this guy to be specific. As president, would he support and sign repeal of DADT? Civil unions or federal domestic-partner recognition? Immigration rights for gay couples?

I doubt he’s given it much thought. Let’s change that."

You know you want to. Here’s how.

Matt and Trey present the spoken words of the wonderful Alan Watts. Yes, I know. I’ve posted it before. Your point?

Optimism about newspapers – online, that is.

Roger Scruton makes the case:

Environmental issues seem to lend themselves to statist solutions. The problems seem so large, so diffuse, so without local definition that the only way to solve them must be by some gesture of control from above in which enlightened intellectuals direct the benighted profiteers. That is a cherished motive on the Left: the hope that progressives will be able to take hold of the state and use it to dictate to the rest of humanity, supposedly for the benefit of everyone.

I wrote a pamphlet for Thatcher back in 1985 called "Greening The Tories" that made a similar argument. Here’s another recent piece of mine on green conservatism. Of course, to some extent, the environment involves a public good that only the state can regulate. That’s the point taken here and here. It’s foolish to deny this. What traditional conservatives can uniquely bring, however, is a way of improving environmental policy to embrace more market-friendly structures, and a better appreciation of how the private sector is most likely to come up with new energy sources. There’s a fruitful right-left synthesis here if we can all grow up and find it.

I also believe that conservatism’s aversion to radical change, its instinctive love of country, and its appreciation of the contingency of place and time and our attachment to both has a distinctly green aspect to it. By conservatism, of course, i don’t mean the fundamentalist nuttery in the current GOP. I mean the kind of pragmatic, small-government prudence outlined in my book. We will save the planet if we love it; and we tend to love it more when we know it best. So environmentalism is strongest, it seems to me, when it works with this grain of human nature, makes us want to preserve what we have made our own, rather than an abstract notion of the "environment" as such. Harnessing our affection for home, for things as they are, for beauty as we find it: this can help bolster the arguments for conservation and global stewardship. And it is a conservative sensibility.

"Technically, as a reader notes below, abusing a corpse in military as well as civilian life is a crime. In this case, I’d apply the legal principle of who cares?" – Jules Crittenden.